


You Come Through Like a Light

by aghamora



Series: Your Mess is Mine [1]
Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, Light Angst, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-20
Updated: 2017-02-20
Packaged: 2018-09-25 21:11:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9844424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aghamora/pseuds/aghamora
Summary: Frank is released from jail, whereupon he and Laurel reassess matters.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Basically with how everything is going in the show rn... I just needed to write a lil Flaurel scene. It was Needed.
> 
> This is also the third time in a row I've used lyrics from the song Nitesky for the title (which plays during that whole 'can I stand here, comfort you that way?' scene at the end of s1). You'll see why it's relevant ;) But that's The Flaurel song as far as I'm concerned.

He doesn’t see her at first.

He steps outside into the blinding sunlight and winces, holding up a hand to shield his face; he hasn’t seen the sun for ages, only caught glimpses through the filthy barred windows from time to time when they’d let him out of his cell, and even then he doesn’t think that’d really counted. His eyes had adapted to continual darkness once before; it hadn’t taken long for them to adapt again.

But then the light fades, and he lowers his hand and rounds a corner, and suddenly, like a vision in the low winter sun, there she is.

Leaning back against the hood of her car, arms crossed tightly over her chest, eyes narrowed but not angry, not iron-hard with hate. Clad in jeans and her coat and a scarf that nearly swallows up her neck entirely. Her lips are pressed together tightly. There are bags under her eyes, lines on her face that weren’t there before. She’s watching him, assessing him, perfectly calm and placid, and when that same sun slants over her in rays and catches her eyes and makes her gleam, he feels his heart sputter inside him for a moment.

He’s never bothered to spend much time wondering what angels in the flesh look like. But he thinks he knows, right then.

“Laurel?”

She doesn’t say anything, stays still, just keeps watching him, watching him so close she might as well be touching him, chin held high, jaw tight with tension. He comes to a stop before her, suddenly aware of the layer of grime coating him from head to toe from that awful place, from his less than hospitable and definitely less than cleanly cellmates. He’s in jeans, the same clothes he’d been wearing when they arrested him. He wishes he could look better, for her. Wishes he could _be_ better. Wishes she didn’t have to pick him up from jail like the piece of shit he is.

Even if she did kind of get him sent here in the first place.

“I thought Bonnie was-”

“I told her I’d do it,” she interrupts him, and her shoulders sag abruptly, muscles relaxing their tension. She eases back somewhat, taking him in from head to toe for a moment before nodding toward the car. “Get in.”

It’s not exactly a friendly invitation. But he’s not about to refuse.

So he does, settling into the passenger side as Laurel starts the car and pulls out of the driveway, eyes fixed straight ahead, apparently not about to give him any more of her words any time soon unless he coaxes them out of her. She feels so cold, so distant, like there are oceans between them even though he’s close enough to touch her. It didn’t used to be like this. Shouldn’t be, after everything they were to each other. But he can’t blame her, and he doesn’t know what to say, anymore, to her. He doesn’t think there’s anything he _can_ say.

He just lets her drive – until finally, finally, Laurel breaks the silence.

“Where’ve you been staying?” she asks, tone clipped, terse, each syllable bitten between her teeth. But no anger. Just a question.

“Motel Six,” he answers, finally daring a glance sideways at her. Her profile is harsh, decidedly sharper, marred and weathered by anger, by grief. “Couple exits off of I-90. I was, at least.”

Laurel takes a moment to process that, then sighs. “Your stuff?”

“All gone, probably. Didn’t have much.”

It’s the truth; he’d had only what he could fit in a suitcase from his months on the lam and a few bottles of booze acquired along the way. Nothing to mourn the loss of, really, but he’s suddenly very aware he has nothing except the clothes on his back, now. Nowhere to go, either.

Laurel seems to be thinking the same thing, because after a moment she exhales sharply, still not sparing him a glance, and turns the wheel suddenly, as if she’s made a decision. “We’ll go to my place.”

His mouth goes dry, and he bristles, automatically, before he can help it. “You don’t-”

“Annalise is still at Bonnie’s,” she explains, pragmatic as ever. “And even if she doesn’t want to murder you anymore, it’s better we not take any chances.”

“I can get another motel-”

She tears her eyes from the road, fixing him with a pointed stare as they come to a stop at a red light. “With what money?”

He freezes. The suitcase. The suitcase with the cash. _Shit._

“Shit,” he echoes the sentiment aloud, balling his hand into a fist.

Laurel looks grimly amused. “Exactly.”

“Think they have a lost and found at shithole motels?”

“I think,” she quips, “some very lucky cleaning lady is probably already drinking margaritas by the dozen on a beach in Mexico.”

He can’t argue with that. All Frank does is give a low _humph_ and shift in his seat, letting silence wash over them once more, letting the drone of the car and sounds on the street substitute for words. He’s always been shit with words, never had them when he needed them; even now, when he has so much to say to her it feels like he’s full to bursting. Apologies. Words of comfort. Words of love. Too many to count. They all swell up inside him like a monsoon, but he knows she doesn’t want to hear him, doesn’t want him here at all. There’s a fierceness about her he’s never seen before; a degree of hardness wrought into her features like ironwork. He doesn’t know her anymore, even though he’d once known her so well.

Better, he thinks, than he’d known himself at times.

They reach her apartment, and he follows her up the stairs to her door, skulking along, eyes mostly downcast, silent but for the clunking of his footsteps on the hardwood. She takes him inside like a stray dog, and that’s what he is, now: a dog abandoned by its master, cast out of the fold, sniffing around at her doorway and seeking a new home. She’s always been his home, in a way, and here she is now; offering him a hand, what might be construed as an olive branch, a table scrap. She’s feeding him, and he knows what they say about stray dogs, about feeding them. About how they’ll keep coming back if you do.

He’ll keep coming back to her anyway, food or not. He doesn’t seem able to help himself.

“You get the couch,” she informs him curtly, shrugging off her coat and hanging it up as he comes to a stop in her living room, not quite sure what to do with himself now that he’s here. It feels surreal, this moment he’s envisioned a thousand times before. He’d pictured it so often these past few weeks, locked away in a concrete box, only allowed his imagination to entertain him. Being back here with her. What he would say. Do. But all that planning has gone out the window, and suffice to say he has no fucking clue what to do now.

This was easy enough as a hypothetical. In reality not so much.

So Frank just nods, dumbly, and takes a seat on the aforementioned couch. “Anything’s better than a prison cot, right?”

The expression on her face sours, ever so slightly, and Laurel folds her arms again, tucking them against her body out of instinct, in an unthinking way that looks like it’s simply become her resting stance. He knows what she’s thinking; how she got him sent there in the first place, even though it wasn’t anything he didn’t want, for Annalise’s sake.

For hers. Even if she doesn’t know that.

“Yeah,” she says, finally. “I guess so.”

Silence, again. It’s tense. There’s enough tension in the air that it feels thick as smog and twice as suffocating, and he wants so badly to talk to her, tell her everything he’s feeling, the words he’s bottled up for weeks behind bars and rehearsed over and over in his dreams, but he can’t. He has too many words to sort through, too many emotions to properly express. All he can do is look at her where she stands in the middle of the room, seemingly at just as much of a loss for what to do as he is. All he can think is how worth it it’d been, all that time; all those hours of misery in there for this moment out here, this blessed moment she’s granted him with her.

“How are you?” is all he can come up with, and he knows how fucking stupid that sounds, so he hastens to continue. “Really, I mean.”

Her jaw is tight, again. She’s clenching it; he can see the muscles ripping beneath her skin. “How do you think I am?”

“I don’t… I’m not askin’ just to ask, okay?” His voice is low, soothing, like he’s coaxing an animal, coaxing her to open up, put down her defenses – if only for a moment. “How are you?”

“You want all the gory details?” She bites out a dark chuckle, turning to face him. “Fine. I have… third degree burns, on my hip and thigh. Most nights the pain keeps me up. Or the nightmares. Or the nausea – because, y’know. I’m pregnant too.” She’s spitting the words, loading them up and firing them at him like bullets, hitting her target every time, square in his chest; a master markswoman when it comes to causing him pain. “And I don’t know what to do about that, either. And I’m so mad. About Wes. About everything.” She sucks in a breath. Her eyes are glistening with tears that she stubbornly refuses to shed, and her words hurt him, God, they scald like acid, but she’s talking to him, not shutting him out, and he knows he has to sit here and take it; he was the one who asked, after all. “So, yeah. I’m great. I’m really _fucking_ great, is that what you wanted to hear?”

He lets the words soak in, doesn’t break the silence, doesn’t get defensive. She needed to say her piece, get that off her chest, and she has. Bonnie had given him regular updates on her, while he was locked up. About how alone she’d felt. How she’d been angry at everyone, bitter, hardened. She’d been alone, hadn’t had anyone she could talk to, _really_ talk to. Still doesn’t.

Even if she yells at him. Curses at him. Tells him she wants him dead again and cuts him with her words like knives. He doesn’t care. He just needs to get her talking.

“And now you’re here,” she keeps going, suddenly, the words so sharp they startle him, pointed as barbs. She laughs, again, and it’s an awful, bladed laugh. “And I don’t even know why you’re here. You’re always here. You just… you just won’t _leave_.”

“You want me to leave?” he asks, calm. Patient as ever.

Laurel thinks for a moment. Then, she shakes her head, and sighs, deflating. “No.”

No. She doesn’t want him gone. She may still hate him, still want him dead, but inexplicably she doesn’t want him gone, even if she only wants him around to serve as some sort of verbal punching bag; even if she’s only taken him in like a stray dog out of pity.

Pity. It must be pity that’s driven her to this. He’s not going to delude himself into thinking it’s anything more.

Laurel exhales sharply, then disappears into the next room for a moment and returns with something folded in her hands; clothing, looks like. He isn’t sure what it is until she tosses it at him, folding her arms again and reassuming that defensive stance a few paces away from where he sits as he takes the items into his hands, feels the familiar fabric beneath his fingertips, and realizes, with a start, what he’s holding.

A flannel. A pair of sweatpants. His.

“You can change into those,” she says with a huff, still unsmiling, features still carved like stone.

He feels his throat tighten. “You, uh, you kept these?”

“You left them here,” she explains, arms still folded, twisting from side to side and pivoting a bit awkwardly. She rubs her lips together, and he swears to God he can see the ice in her eyes thaw, for the briefest of moments. “I just… I don’t know. Never threw them out.”

His clothes. She kept them. She could’ve thrown them away, burnt them. Probably she should have – but she didn’t. Maybe she’d put them on to sleep at night, tried to smell him on the fabric, all those times she’d called, left him voicemails they’d both known he wouldn’t and couldn’t answer. He broke them, with that, by leaving her, by making her think he didn’t care when he did, when he did so fucking much he’d tried to stay away, knowing she was better off without him. He’d tried to do that for her – even if she hadn’t understood. Even if she never can.

They’re so broken now. There’s so much distance between them. But irrationally, stupidly, like the idiot he always is, he still has so much hope.

“Thanks,” he rasps, offering her a tentative little smile, feeling her out, seeing if she’ll reciprocate.

Laurel doesn’t, unsurprisingly, but she does soften somewhat, her face losing its harsh angles and sharp edges and relaxing into something more a tad bit more familiar. “Yeah.”

Silence, again. It isn’t particularly uncomfortable now; it feels necessary, in a way. Neither of them have the words to fill it; there’s so much to say they can never say it all. He doesn’t think he can try, or _should_ try – but then Laurel meets his eyes, seems to make up her mind about something, and speaks first.

“You confessed. To Wes. You told the police you did it,” she states simply, eyes narrowed. “Why? For Annalise?”

“Wasn’t all for Annalise,” he murmurs, shaking his head. His throat feels packed tight with sand, aching, and he meets her eyes, that clear, jarring, almost unnerving blue, and he aches worse still. “It was for you too.” She’s silent. She doesn’t prompt him to continue though it’s clear she doesn’t fully understand, and it takes him a moment, but eventually he does. “After the hospital. When you said it shoulda been me. I thought… it’d be easier, if you had someone to blame. Somebody to hate.”

“You were gonna let me believe you did it,” she says, composure faltering. She’s opening up, angling herself towards him, finally relenting. “You were… you were gonna let me hate you.”

“Yeah.” He nods. “If it’d make it hurt less.”

The words wash over them, and Laurel lets them sink in before suddenly she bites out another awful, dark laugh, shaking her head.

“I don’t get it, you know,” she says, voice thick. “Why you don’t hate me.”

He frowns and rises to stand. “Laurel-”

“I don’t know what I have to do,” Laurel continues, almost snarling; possessed. She’s yelling, and she’s never been one to yell; he’s never heard her yell like this in his life. The quiet one. The wallflower. She doesn’t yell – but she isn’t a flower anymore; all her petals and stems and silence have been stripped away like vultures picking her bones clean, and what’s left of her is laid bare, bitter and angry. “To make you hate me. I’m… having some other guy’s baby. I-I got you sent to jail. I told you I wanted you dead. What else do I have to do?”

“I-”

“Just tell me,” she hisses, and there are tears in her eyes now. She looks like she’s staring at him through two furious, simmering puddles. Her teeth are barred, but she’s not yelling now; she’s growling, low and lethal. “Just tell me what I have to do to make you hate me, Frank.”

The answer is simple: nothing. There’s nothing she can do to make him hate her. Even if she took a knife, gutted him, slit his throat. Killed him. He’d bleed out for her. Bleed love. He’d die loving her, love her with the last few fading beats of his heart.

“I could never hate you,” he tells her, softly, simply.

He’s not going to yell back, and they both know it, and Laurel seems to realize it too because she lets out a shaky breath, sniffling and backing away.

“You should,” she spits, but there’s not much venom in her tone, nor much conviction. “It’d be easier if you did. If I did.” He glances up at her, approaching hesitantly and coming to a stop a few feet away; enough distance to respect the implicit boundaries she’s set between them, but close enough to speak quietly, look in her eyes. Laurel shifts, lowering hers and turning away. “It’d be so much easier if I hated you.”

He swallows, tries to muster up his voice, but Laurel keeps going before he can.

“I tried,” she confesses. He can feel the anger flood out of her like the sea rushing over lava, cooling it back into stone. When she looks up at him and holds his gaze, all the air goes out of him in a similar manner. “Hating you. All those months you were gone. And when I was with Wes. I tried… so hard.”

Closer still. He’s moving in, daring to venture closer, and she’s not stepping back; she’s just looking at him, chin raised, so strong; an immovable mountain of a girl, but no, he thinks, not a girl any longer. Not Frank’s girl. She never was. A woman. She looks like she could face down armies.

She’s a hurricane, an oncoming storm. He bows to her winds like the forests of trees and blades of grass. He’s never had a choice in the matter.

“I hate you,” she finally says, as though testing the words, struggling to make herself believe them, but there’s a flash of something in her eyes that tells him they aren’t true, and that she doesn’t, not even a little. Her breathing picks up, coming in harsher, frantic pulls the nearer he draws. “I hate you so much.”

He could tell her she doesn’t, but he doesn’t need to; they both know she doesn’t, that she never has and never will, even with all the blood on his hands, the blood that has pooled between them, blood they’re up to their knees in. These months have been hell, but at the very least they’ve laid the both of them out plain for the other to see, put everything on the table, ripped all their ugliness and lies and deceit from their dark hidden places, torn the skeletons from their closets and set them on display like mannequins. That’s the only solace he has, Frank thinks, as they stand here together, in the midst of the rubble of whatever love they’d once had.

This is the most real they’ve ever been with each other.

“I’m so mad,” she grinds out through her teeth. She’s almost quivering with rage, quivering with the power contained beneath her skin, her might, like she’s being battered by some internal wind. “At all of them. The others. Acting like they cared. They never gave a shit about him. Or me.”

God, he wants to go to her, hold her, wrap her in his arms, afford her whatever comfort he’s good for, but he won’t. He’s broken down her invisible walls built with invisible bricks, maybe, but there’s still something between them, keeping them apart. He aches for her, feels her pain as though it’s his own. Like their heart are joined, fused together into one malformed, pulsing, bloody muscle that sustains them both, broken as they are.

He doesn’t know what to do with everything he’s feeling. All he can do is feel it.  

“And everything hurts, all the time.” Her voice is softer now, so small and sad, but still holding an edge to it, her teeth still clenched. She won’t look at him. “And it never stops.”

He almost reaches out; it’s in his code, in his biology, to reach for her when she’s hurting, like a dog sensing its masters distress, but again he catches himself, inches a bit closer instead, until there’s no more than a foot between them, a gap that grows smaller by the second. He watches her closely, hoping, irrationally, she can feel the tenderness in his eyes as they sweep across her. He loves her so much he wants to pour it into her.

“I know,” is all he says, because he can’t make it better, can’t make it all go away. He can only be here.

He can only tell her he understands.

“I didn’t mean it,” she tells him, after a long moment, the longest in the world. She looks up, meeting his eyes finally. “What I said. That it should’ve been you.” She pauses, sniffing. “I didn’t mean that.”

She was angry. She lashed out. In many ways he’d probably deserved it, and it hadn’t made him mad, sure as hell hadn’t made him hate her. He’d stood there and taken it, like her whipping boy. Borne those blows for her. And she’s hurting so badly, angry at the world, trusting no one, pregnant and scared and alone – and still she’s looking at him, apologizing to him, opening herself to him. It means more than he could ever say. It makes him love her in a way that feels like it could kill him, like a harpoon shot straight through his chest, again with that impeccable aim of hers.

He’s reaching for her before he can think better of it, melting, a sudden overwhelming need to touch her coming over him. “C’mere-”

But Laurel moves back, shrinking away, and it hurts, but it doesn’t catch him off guard, not entirely. She may trust him. She may have apologized to him. But they’re not there yet; he doesn’t know if they’ll ever be there again, in that place where she’s comfortable with him touching her, comfortable enough to share that degree of intimacy, and so he lowers his arm immediately, standing down.

“Don’t.”

It’s almost a plea, the word. It kills him, but he understands, and he nods. And that’s when Frank realizes.

They’ve been here before.

That night in front of the office, the night she’d come to him, certain the police had found them out, certain they were all doomed to spend the rest of their lives rotting in jail. She’d refused to let him touch her then, choosing instead to stand on her own, turn down comfort because she didn’t need it; not that way, at least. She’d shrugged him off, but it hadn’t felt right to leave, even if she didn’t want his touch.

He couldn’t offer her his touch. She wouldn’t allow him that. He’d offered her his presence instead, and his presence alone.

“Can I just stand here, then?” Frank asks, timid as a schoolboy. He always feels like a child with her, scared and small, seeing the world through a fresh pair of eyes. Somehow he manages a sad, rueful grin, saturated with longing for times gone by, times they can never return to. People they can never be again. “Comfort you that way?

Familiar words. Laurel recognizes them in an instant. They open her up in a way none of his others have been able to, dismantle that final unseen barrier between them, cross the oceans of distance between them. He’d said those words to her once before, in another lifetime. He can see that she remembers.

It takes her a moment. But then she nods.

“Fine.”

And so he does. He stands there, comforts her that way – whatever way that is. However it helps. Even if it doesn’t help at all. She’s hurting so badly, in a way that pumps through her veins, in a way that is embedded in the very cells of her body, her soul. In a way that makes his own pain feel like a drop in the ocean of hers. They’ve been apart for so long they’re like strangers now, but she’s looking at him like a stranger and also like someone she’s known all her life, not shying away, no hesitance. There’s so much between them, so much to discuss, enough for both their mouths to run dry of words, but that can wait. This moment can’t.

Frank isn’t sure how long they stand there. Ultimately, he figures it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that he is.

He is standing there. However it helps. Even if it doesn’t help at all.

He’s here with her, now.


End file.
